Feeble Bibles

The Bible being one of the few books in which a printing error can imperil the immortal souls of millions of people, Sod’s law has paid its compositors particular attention over the years.
“I knew the tyme when great care was had about printing,” grumbled a 17th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, “the Bibles especially, good compositors and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the beste, but now the paper is nought, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned.”
Most “unlearned” of all were undoubtedly the correctors on the so-called “Wicked Bible” of 1631, published by the royal printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas. What was intended to be a straightforward reprint of the King James version went critically wrong with the accidental omission of an important “not”. Exodus 20:14, therefore, told the faithful: “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
Missing out a word is one thing. But how the printers came to misspell the word “greatness” quite so badly in Deuteronomy 5:24 continues to beggar the imagination. “The Lord,” it announced, “hath shewed us his glory and his great arse.”
A furious Charles I ordered all copies recalled and burned (only 11 survive today), and the printers hauled before the Star Chamber. They were discouraged from continuing their publishing career.
A quarter-century later, another missing “not” gave encouragement to sinners, when a 1653 edition asked: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God?” An edition in 1716 had Christ inviting his flock to “Go and sin on more.” A 1763 Bible told readers – another of those pesky missing negatives – “the fool hath said in his heart there is a God”.
Other editions have introduced a “Parable of the Vinegar” where the devout were expecting a vineyard, an additional miracle (“thy son that shall come forth out of thy lions”), an underwhelming Creation (“...the first heaven and the first earth were passed away and there was more sea”) and have wondered whether Gilead contains treacle.
Some mistakes are deliberate, however. Surely the misprint for “princes” in a pre-1700 edition of the Bible was the work of a disgruntled typesetter – Psalms 119:161: “Printers have persecuted me without cause.”

Altruism Fail, Pt One

In 1995, Tom and Trixie Cummins of Austin, Texas decided to do something to help homeless people in their area after being reduced to tears by a local television report about a canned food drive.
“We’d had a few drinks and immediately started gathering most of the tins we had in the kitchen, drove them down to the depot, and handed them over. I’d forgotten all about it until yesterday, when we were getting ready for a toga party and Trixie asked me to get her diamond necklace,” he told reporters.
“I picked up the fake Campbell’s soup can where we keep our valuables and tried to open it. I couldn’t twist the top off, but at first I just thought it was rusty, so I used a can opener to open the lid. But inside there was only scotch broth.
“I remember saying to Trixie ‘I don’t feel too good,’ just before I passed out.”
Although the Campbell’s Soup company volunteered to match Mr Cummins’s offer of $2,500 as a reward for its return, the can full of jewellery was never recovered.
“One good deed and I’m over $70,000 out of pocket,” said Mr Cummins, who was cautioned by police for spray-painting the words “robbing cheating scum” on the front windows of his insurance company.

Where Is The Lake That Late We Had?

Lake Peigneur was a pretty, ten-foot deep freshwater lake in Louisiania popular with fishermen from the surrounding area. A small island on the lake was given over to a pretty botanical garden, and the area was rich in natural mineral resources: deep underneath it were miles of tunnels given over to the Diamond Crystal salt mine, and across the surrounding landscape were dotted richly productive oil wells.
Early one November morning in 1980, twelve employees of Texaco petroleum, aboard an oil rig in the middle of the lake, were drilling an exploratory hole when their drilling rig suddenly seized up, more than 1,000 feet below the surface.
Try as they might, they couldn’t seem to free it. Suddenly, there came a series of ominous plops and belches from the muddy depths, and the rig listed over alarmingly. The oilmen weren’t sure what was going to happen, but decided that the safest place to watch it from was the shore.
As they reached shore, behind them the $5 million rig turned turtle and vanished beneath the surface of the lake – a lake that was supposed to be only ten feet deep. Moments later, where the rig had been, the water started to turn. A whirlpool formed.
Texaco, as it turned out, had miscalculated the position of the Diamond Crystal salt mine, and drilled a 14” hole in the top of one of the main shafts. The water rushed into the salt dome, dissolving the salt and steadily enlarging the hole as it went.
As if the plug had been pulled out of a ten-square-mile bathtub – the entire contents of the lake started to disappear into the mines.
As miners scrambled to evacuate the salt mines and the oilmen watched the carnage, gobsmacked, from the shore, one local fisherman steered his boat to shore, tied it to a tree and leaped out -- only to watch boat and tree both vanish into the whirlpool. Pockets of compressed air in the salt-mines exploded into 400ft geysers.
The whirlpool also swallowed another drilling platform, a barge loading dock, five houses, 70 acres of soil from Jefferson Island, most of the botanical gardens, trucks, trees, a motor home and a parking lot. So powerful was the suction that it reversed the flow of a canal leading from the lake to the Gulf of Mexico, creating a 164-foot waterfall (the tallest – temporarily -- in the state of Louisiana) and sucking 11 barges and a manned tugboat into the salt mines.
Two days later, nine of the barges popped back up to the surface like corks.
Nobody was hurt.

Armed Robbery Fail

At around teatime on 3rd February 1990, David Zaback strolled into a crowded shop in Washington State in the North-West of the United States. He pulled out a .38-caliber semiautomatic pistol, announced that this was a robbery and that he’d shoot dead anybody who didn’t put their hands on the counter and keep them there.
His instructions were disregarded. Several of the customers, a shop assistant and a policeman immediately drew guns and invited him to make their day -- which he promptly did.
The mistake he made, as he would have had cause to reflect afterwards had he not been lying dead with three bullets in the chest and one in his arm, was that the shop he chose to try and rob was called “H & J Leather and Firearms Limited”. The clue was in the name.
Actually, that wasn’t his only mistake. His other mistake was deciding to rob the shop while Timothy Lally, a policeman with 18 years experience on the force, was leaning up against the counter having a coffee and shooting the breeze with owner of the gun-shop. Mr Lally was in uniform at the time.
“The surprising thing,” Police Captain Don Persson told reporters afterwards, “is that the man had to walk right past a marked police car to get in the front door.”

Mmmm.... Doughnuts!

In 2002, two enterprising pranksters spotted a Krispy Kreme doughnut truck idling in the parking lot of a Louisiana convenience store. While the driver was inside making his delivery, they hijacked the truck and roared off in the direction of the nearby town of Lacombe, rubbing their tummies like Yogi Bear in receipt of a pickernick basket.
They were disconcerted, said 31-year-old Rose Houk – who bashfully admitted that they’d been smoking crack “for hours” before the incident – when the police caught up with them. They had not realised that the rear doors of the truck were open throughout their getaway, and they had left a 15-mile-long trail of doughnuts along the highway.

Jade-Like Girls Go MaxPlanck Crazy

In the autumn of 2008, the editors of MaxPlanckForschung, the journal of the Max Planck Institute, one of Germany’s most prestigious research bodies, published a special issue dedicated to China. They asked one of their journalists to find “an elegant Chinese poem” to adorn the cover, and he duly came up with five columns of pretty-looking kanji pictograms, which they printed in elegant white on red.
Only when the issue fell into the hands of native Chinese speakers did it become clear that something had gone wrong. The literal translation of the “poem” was as follows:

With high salaries, we have cordially invited for an extended series of matinées
KK and Jiamei as directors, who will personally lead jade-like girls in the spring of youth,
Beauties from the north who have a distinguished air of elegance and allure,
Young housewives having figures that will turn you on;
Their enchanting and coquettish performance will begin within the next few days.

“It is not my intention to provide a complete explication de texte,” wrote linguistics blogger Victor Mair in a thoughtful postmortem. It appeared, he was prepared to venture though, to be an advertisement for some form of adult entertainment.
“Regardless of how we interpret the quadripartite character,” Mair mused, “we can tell from context that it indicates the two individuals who are in charge of the girls in the show. Clearly this is an advertisement for some kind of burlesque business. I did find quite a few references on the Web to a “KK Juggy” from a group called “Machine Gun Fellatio”, and apparently the KK in her name stands for “Knickers” and “Knockers.” Perhaps KK in the sense of “Knickers and Knockers” is an Australian expression, since KK Juggy (Christa Hughes) is from Sydney.”
And there, perhaps, the mystery is best left.